I file my last article for the Mail tonight, 12 May. It’s the story of a father forced to take legal action against the National Health Service to uncover a series of failings that had led to the death of his twenty-month-old son, and I shan’t be sorry to take a break from such disturbing material.
Many such stories seem to come my way and, as the father of a young child myself, I find interviewing grieving parents increasingly difficult. In 2016, I wrote a series of articles as part of a Daily Mail campaign to expose the hidden toll of entirely avoidable deaths caused by sepsis, an overreaction of the body’s immune system to even the mildest infection. One interview I did was with a well-known actor and his wife, who on New Year’s Day in 2011 lost their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter to a condition that, if recognised sufficiently early by doctors, can easily be treated with antibiotics. Their courage, and determination to make public their private pain in the hope that others might be spared their shattering ordeal, was as inspiring as it was heartbreaking.
It isn’t too much of a wrench, in other words, to hit the pause button on journalism, though doing so is to break the greatest taboo for any freelancer – saying no to a commissioning editor. In a month or two, when I return to the real world, will I have been displaced in their favour by another? Will they even remember who I am? But I have no choice other than to risk that. Building this boat, as I have come to appreciate, is all about taking a series of leaps into the unknown.
And then Phoebe contracts chicken pox. It’s not a bad case, and she deals with it remarkably well, but she can’t go to nursery for a week or two and my first week as a full-time boatbuilder is spent neither earning money as a journalist nor building boats.
Actually, that isn’t entirely true. When Phoebe and I have exhausted all the possibilities of Play-Doh, hide-and-seek, drawing, painting, glue-and-glitter arts and crafts and staging home-theatre performances with casts of furry toys, I suddenly remember Eric McKee’s cut-out-and-build cardboard half-model of a 10ft clinker workboat. What a great project for a daddy and his daughter!
But it isn’t. It proves far too fiddly for a three-year-old, who quickly loses interest. We settle down on the sofa for some mid-afternoon TV therapy and, after she falls asleep, I return enthusiastically to the dining table with craft knife and glue. I plan to surprise her with the finished model, which she can then paint. Only, it proves too fiddly for a grown man with a real boat to build.
By now I flatter myself that I know my way around a set of boat plans, but McKee’s Lilliputian instructions – ‘Hem home with fine sand paper’, ‘Chase hood ends with razor blade’ – are as abstruse as anything the real world has to offer, and I can’t bring myself to embark on a fresh voyage of learning simply for the sake of a paper boat – and only half of one, at that. Sanity itself demands that I must draw the line at McKee’s suggestion that the builder of his cardboard boat should source and then modify wooden clothes pegs as nippers – life is already too short and, I feel, I’ve done my bit in this department by creating real nippers for the real job in hand.
But the eerie thing about McKee’s little model boat, and what makes my inability to make it feel like the direst of portents, is how utterly similar it is to the real boat I am building. Both are 10ft long (the model to scale), both have ten strakes a side and both utilise four moulds. The shapes of the transoms and the line of the sheer strakes are all but identical and there are even little ribs, floorboards and benches to be cut out and stuck on the inside of the hull. But, clearly, by a more committed parent than me.
With a deep sense of shame, and not a little unease, I commit the remains to the recycling bin where, later that evening, Kate discovers the evidence of my incompetence.
‘What’s this?’ she asks, pulling out some of the wreckage. I suspect she knows full well what it is. ‘So did you and Phoebe do some craftwork?’
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘we did. For a bit. But Phoebe lost interest – I think she was too tired.’
I’m feigning fascination with a book, but I can feel Kate’s knowing smirk boring into the back of my head.
‘All right,’ I say, closing the book with a sigh and turning to confront my tormentor. ‘Both Phoebe and I lost interest. Satisfied? Honestly, it really was very, very fiddly and difficult. You should have seen it.’
Kate can see it, of course, or, at least, the remains of it, which she is holding between a thumb and forefinger and inspecting with an expression that says, ‘Looks easy enough to me.’ What she actually says, as she drops the mutilated sheets of paper back into the bin, is, ‘Well, thank goodness the real thing isn’t proving as fiddly and difficult as that.’ I do enjoy a healthy dose of sarcasm.
19
VERY, VERY SLOWLY DOES IT
‘Every man should pull a boat over a mountain once in his life.’
– Werner Herzog
2 JUNE 2017
I’m packing up to go home at the end of a long but productive day in the shed when it dawns on me – I am halfway through planking the boat. The hull of the Nottage consists of ten strakes each side, and now five are in place. This is good news, but also a little bad.
It has taken me seven weeks to get this far – about five days per strake. Though I recognise that’s a lousy rate, it wouldn’t actually matter if it weren’t for the fact that I’m now in a race to get all the planking done, and the inside of the hull prepped and painted, before Ron arrives from Germany to help me put in the ribs. He will be here on 7 July, and we plan to work flat out over the following two days. It’s a tough proposition – there are thirty-eight transverse ribs to be steamed, bent and riveted into position, something neither of us has ever heard of before this, let alone done – but I aim to get all thirty-eight in the boat in a single weekend.
It isn’t only that Ron is my best bet for the double act, and that no one else I know can spare enough time in one go. But once the ribs are in place the bulk of the technical work on the boat will be done and I’m planning to hit pause on the build in order to return to the increasingly pressing business of paying the mortgage. But I have only five more weeks to get the rest of the strakes on and prepare the boat for Ron’s arrival – and that means I must raise my strake strike rate from one every five days to one every three-and-a-half days.
It’s a challenge. With each strake that goes on, access to the inside of the boat becomes more restricted and it gets harder and harder to hammer down the roves accurately on the nails. Instead of speeding up, as I imagined I might with practice, I actually seem to be slowing down. To complicate matters further, though riveting single-handed without Fabian’s ingenious dolly-clamp would be impossible, now the planks are becoming more vertical the device is increasingly in the way, and perfectly positioned for me to bang my head on.
As a result of the cramped space inside the hull, quite apart from the agonising contortions that are necessary all too often I find myself distorting a nail because of the difficulty of positioning the roving punch correctly and striking it end-on. Some I am able to tease back into alignment with a pair of pliers. Others, obviously beyond salvation, I manage to remove and replace, but only after a fierce struggle. I suppose I should take some comfort from the realisation that, once in, these nails really don’t want to come out. In both cases, though, I am keenly aware that all this fiddling about might be compromising the integrity of the nail hole, which has been drilled precisely to ensure a tight fit.
In the long, dark hours of the soul spent sweating and swearing and grazing knuckles, hammering fingertips and banging elbows in the confined spaces under the inverted hull, Gardner’s ominous warning is never far from my mind: treat them wrong, and copper rivets will come back to bite you – or, at least, to sink you. They ‘will buckle and cripple within the wood, without drawing tight, even to the point of sometimes splitting the lap’. Only time – and the introduction of the boat to water – will tell if my inconsistent riveting is up to par.
I’m also developing a hate-hate rela
tionship with the extra mould Fabian decided I needed at the bow, which is making riveting exceptionally difficult at the front end of the boat – the gap between mould one and the stem, and between mould one and mould two, is a mere 12in. I know the plus-one mould is well intentioned – without it, there’s a danger that because of the big bend required of planks as they turn into the stem, an amateur like me could well end up with a flat spot in the bow, instead of a pleasing curve. But, I’m an average kind of guy, 6ft tall and with reasonably broad shoulders, and trying to work in these spaces is starting to drive me up the wall. It’s a good job Phoebe isn’t around, because Daddy’s using a lot of banned words.
Gardner has something to say about the issue of moulds getting in the way in an article about building a dinghy designed by the late, great American yacht designer L. Francis Herreshoff, which calls for the use of no fewer than seven moulds in a boat no bigger than the Nottage. ‘Old-time builders of lapstrake boats frequently used only one mould, called the “shadow”, which was set up amidships,’ he writes. This, of course, was the technique used by Sam King at Pin Mill. But this method, as Gardner goes on to explain, ‘required a high order of skill attainable only through long practice, and, I dare say, even so, boats did not always shape out exactly as planned’.
Therefore, he advises, a beginner should employ all seven moulds, even though they are only 15in apart and the working space between them will prove tight. But then Gardner has second thoughts, which he adds to the article in a footnote. My guess is he received some letters from some frustrated broad-shouldered followers. While it was nice to have plenty of moulds to ensure a fair and accurate hull shape, he says, ‘the spacing . . . would be pretty close . . . in amidships, especially, it would be hard to reach in between moulds set as close as this to get at the rivets conveniently in order to do the careful, painstaking job in heading them up which is so important and critical’.
So on reflection he thinks it desirable for the amateur to use only alternate moulds – ‘certainly’, he adds (with a refreshing directness that would earn a modern-day author a Twitter lynching, and this daddy a scolding from the junior word police), ‘for fat men’.
This phase of the build – halfway through the planking – feels interminable, with no end in sight. It is, as I know, vital not to look up, to keep putting one foot in front of the other. But pressure must be released and I do a lot of talking out loud, alternately pleading with or threatening inanimate objects, or shouting at the radio. Though I’m used to working alone as a journalist, boatbuilding, with its series of leaps of faith and hills and valleys of elation and savage despondency, is a particularly gruelling solitary activity. Striking up conversations with uncooperative tools or intransigent pieces of timber seems, counterintuitively, to be a functional way of retaining a degree of sanity.
Right from the beginning I suspected that if any part of the process of building this boat was going to tip me over the edge, it would be the planking. In the months between setting up my pop-up boatyard and reaching the point where planking began, I’d thought a lot about the process. Planking, as I well understood from the outset, was the central skill at the heart of the clinker tradition, a noble, time-honoured practice that, with good reason, has evolved little in over 2,000 years. I also knew that it would be the real challenge at the core of this unskilled amateur’s ill-considered decision to try to build a traditional wooden boat.
There’s no doubt that up till now each strake has been a complete swine, extracting blood, sweat and tears as the price of its ultimate, reluctant cooperation. Before the planking began, I had had my ups and downs on the boat. Making the stem and the keel and the whole centreline was tougher than I’d imagined it would be. Even creating the relatively simple moulds had been testing. But with those hurdles behind me, I’d been on something of a self-confidence high back in April when Fabian delivered his planking masterclass. That night, as I reflected on the task ahead, I tapped out the following hubristic diary entry:
‘So who’d have thought it? I really am poised to pull this off. I feel I have reached out across time to make a connection with something magical and precious, and all but beyond the reach of our modern world. In a month or two Phoebe shall all but have her boat . . .’
And so on. Shudder. Embarrassingly pretentious, yes – but also wildly complacent.
A month or two? Two months had passed since then and the job was still only half-done. It was probably just as well that at the outset I had no idea of the reality – that ahead lay months of soul-suckingly tough labour, during which I would be tested physically and mentally in a way I never had been before. And I include Atlantic rowing attempts in that sweeping generalisation.
For one thing, as a man who has spent a large part of his working life sitting in comfy chairs, I was not used to being on my feet all day – even rowing the Atlantic, while arduous, by its very nature involves a great deal of sitting down. In the shed, despite a feel-good diet of pork pies and ginger biscuits, I began to burn off weight. Muscles and tendons I never knew existed – vestigial remnants, perhaps, of an anatomy that had evolved to tackle now redundant physical tasks – were reluctantly recruited and inflamed by the alien and endlessly repeated acts of sawing, planing and chiselling.
Planking this boat would prove to be a process that would take my entire being by surprise, leaving me physically drained, often furious at my own incompetence and occasionally weeping with frustration. At the end of it I would be a changed person – humbler, certainly, and full of respect for those who chose to pursue this path as a living – and nursing a range of mysterious aches and pains located mainly, but not exclusively, in my arms.
I would love to report that I came to be as one with the timber, that I came to respect and understand its timeless magic and mystery. We did, it’s true, develop a relationship, but more often than not it was an abusive one, in which I begged and pleaded for cooperation and the timber did nothing but reinforce a growing paranoia that it was out to get me – to punish me, perhaps, for daring to deprive it of its rightful destiny.
To watch an expert like Fabian planking a wooden boat in the clinker style is to be privileged to witness a ballet of collaboration between craftsperson and nature, a perfectly choreographed dance to the beat of an ancient song that echoes across the centuries with undiminished passion. I, on the other hand, found myself engaged in brutal hand-to-hand combat, a war of attrition from which neither man nor timber would emerge unscathed or fully victorious. I would like to record that I embarked upon a journey of enlightenment, a journey that may have begun in the shadowed vale of ignorance but ended on the sunlit uplands of understanding, but I would be lying. Each plank, from the first to the last, was an unmitigated struggle. Although I came to sort of understand what I was doing, there was never a lightbulb moment, a breakthrough in complete comprehension. I made every possible mistake over and over again. I stumbled repeatedly into every potential pitfall.
But stumble on I had to. I was committed, emotionally, morally and financially. By this time I had spent thousands of pounds on tools, wood and other materials, to say nothing of the monthly shed rental of £130 and the lost income from journalism. And even if I could have afforded to write it all off, this time there would be – could be – no giving up. This boat was my promise, my gift, to Phoebe. It – and the example of my having made it – was supposed to inspire her, to dream big and to reach beyond her grasp. I did not want Daddy’s undying message to his daughter to be that it’s okay to quit when the going gets tough, because it most certainly isn’t, as I already knew to my cost.
That’s what the small yellow wooden disc nailed to the wall of the boat shed is for – to remind me daily that I quit on one boat before, leaving its half-burnt corpse to sink 4,000m down to the floor of the Atlantic. It also serves as a reminder of the words of Rob Hamill, the Kiwi Atlantic rowing legend who had called me via satellite phone in November 2001 to talk me out of abandoning the Atlantic rowing race: �
��Pain is just for now. Failure lasts for ever.’
I’d made the mistake of ignoring his advice then. I wouldn’t do so again.
But, as I contemplate the half-finished, doubtless flawed but nevertheless utterly and surprisingly beautiful little boat that is emerging despite my worst efforts, I realise that something else is going on – something that has crept up on me unnoticed and wholly unexpectedly.
I am starting to enjoy myself.
I might not have got any better, or much faster, or appreciably more confident in what I’m doing. Most certainly I am still making mistakes and, as Fabian assured me it would be, planking is a complete and utter bloody slog. But, dammit, I’m enjoying it.
20
SUNNY SIDE UP AGAIN
‘ “Now then, Pooh,” said Christopher Robin, “where’s your boat?”
“I ought to say,” explained Pooh as they walked down to the shore of the island, “that it isn’t just an ordinary sort of boat. Sometimes it’s a Boat, and sometimes it’s more of an Accident. It all depends.”
“Depends on what?”
“On whether I’m on the top of it or underneath it.” ’
– A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
19 JUNE 2017
Having a child, I’m discovering, is a little like having a nervous breakdown. It’s the same for Kate. Either of us can be moved to cry at the drop of a hat – there’s a bubbling volcano of emotion, just beneath the surface and ready to blow at the slightest provocation. News stories, films, books . . . we’ve learnt to avoid dramas involving young children in distress for fear of unleashing floods of tears, but almost anything can tug at our highly strung heart strings.
Yesterday was Father’s Day in the UK, an American import that, along with Cyber Monday and trick or treat, I once would have treated with disdain. Not any more. Kate and Phoebe bring me breakfast in bed, and a Father’s Day card Phoebe made at nursery. ‘Happy farter’s day, Daddy,’ says Phoebe, giggling and extremely proud of her knowing play on words. ‘I made this for you,’ she adds, throwing the laminated sheet of A4 in my general direction and returning to Charlie and Lola on the iPad. Yes, breakfast and children’s TV in bed.
How to Build a Boat Page 23